52 Books for 52 Places

Explore the cities, countries, regions and states in Travel’s “52 Places to Go in 2019” through these books.

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By The Editors

Feb. 14, 2019

In an interview earlier this year, The Times’s new 52 places traveler, Sebastian Modak, questioned whether he would have to give up his “physical books and buy a Kindle” as he traveled to 52 places in 2019. His response: “Probably.” He also wondered whether he would “even have time to read books.” His answer: “Probably not.”

But for those of you planning to follow in his footsteps to one or two of those places, time may be more in your favor. So here are some reading suggestions — fiction and nonfiction, essays, poems — that may help you to better explore those cities, countries, regions and states. Let us know what you think. Feeling inspired? Send a photo of the book you’re reading on your travels to books@nytimes.com.

No. 1 Puerto Rico

‘When I Was Puerto Rican,’ by Esmeralda Santiago

Santiago’s memoir of growing up in Puerto Rico before moving to Brooklyn with her family and eventually ending up at Harvard isa staple on middle school, high school and college reading lists. Readers will admire Santiago’s “vivid, poignant writing.”

No. 2 Hampi, India

‘Love & Death in the Middle Kingdom,’ by Nalini Rajan

This historical book of fiction involves the present-day discovery of a 16th-century courtier’s diary in the Indian west coast town of Honnavar.

No. 3 Santa Barbara, Calif.

‘Banshee,’ by Margaret Millar

Millar’s psychological thriller is centered around the untimely death of the young daughter of wealthy Californian landowners.

No. 4 Panama

‘The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal,’ by David McCullough

“Trust David McCullough to come up with a chunk of history so full of giant‐sized characters and so rich in political skulduggery, financial scheming technological innovation and medical pioneering that by the end of his telling of it he has us convinced that the digging of the canal was symbolic of the entire Western era between the Franco‐Prussian War and the outbreak of World War I.”

‘Munich,’ by Robert Harris

“Harris’s meticulously researched and expertly paced thriller, ‘Munich,’ recounts the days leading up to the ill-fated agreement,” or the Munich accord, which symbolized false hopes and Nazi duplicity in the countdown to World War II.

‘Pachinko,’ by Min Jin Lee

“‘Pachinko’ chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s.

‘The Tenth Island,’ by Diana Marcum

“Saudade is a Portuguese word with no direct translation that conveys a deep longing for something that perhaps never was and yet may never come again. It suggests a melancholy satisfaction.” Marcum captures the elusive nature of this word that “is central to understanding the Portuguese spirit, and more specifically the Azorean one.”

‘The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,’ by Dan Egan

In telling a grim tale of how climate change, overpopulation and invasive species destabilizes a sensitive ecosystem, Egan “nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.”

‘The Tiger’s Wife,’ by Téa Obreht

“With fables and allegories, as well as events borrowed from the headlines, Obreht illustrates the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence that pervade the region even in times of peace.”

‘These Truths: A History of the United States,’ by Jill Lepore

‘Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season,’ by John Gregory Dunne

“Vegas” is “a semi-autobiographical book about a sojourn in that city” and the types of people who live there. It is “a fine, wry, perceptive, graceful book that does as much for the dark side of the American fun house as Hunter Thompson's ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ did for the manic side.”

‘Tereza Batista: Home From the Wars,’ by Jorge Amado

The Brazilian writer Amado loved Salvador. His “exuberant spirit, aesthetic and characters seem to permeate the streets of the place he described both as ‘the most mysterious and beautiful of the world’s cities.’” For visitors, he “went so far as to suggest an itinerary in his novel, ‘Tereza Batista.’” He wanted tourists to see every element of the city from its beaches and churches to its festivals and whorehouses.

No. 15 Danang, Vietnam

‘The Book of Salt,’ by Monique Truong

The narrator of this debut novel is a Vietnamese live-in cook working for Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in Paris. “He concocts both Vietnamese delicacies and American apple pie, evoking memories for the household with the intensity of Proust's madeleine and adding an exotic spice for poignancy.”

‘Like Water for Chocolate,’ by Laura Esquivel

Esquivel, a Mexican novelist, uses magical realism to tell the story of the youngest daughter of the De La Garza family in turn-of-the-century Mexico, who expresses her hopes and sadness through her cooking.

No. 17 Paparoa Track, New Zealand

‘To the Is-Land,’ by Janet Frame

This first volume of the autobiography of the novelist and poet Janet Frame focuses on her early life in New Zealand. “It is a wistful tale, honestly and believably told, of the puzzling encounters of childhood, the recognitions, the gain and the loss.”

‘Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray,’ by Adam Federman

Gray’s 1986 autobiography, “Honey From a Weed,” turned her into a cult figure for her “artful compilation of memories, recipes and traveler’s tales” in Italy. In his biography of Gray, Federman has “created a fully formed character … honoring not only her brilliance but the rough edges that made her human.”

‘Zoli,’ by Colum McCann

“In ‘Zoli,’ a novel about the Gypsies of Eastern Europe, McCann imagines a deeper, darker watchword for this immemorially wandering and persecuted people: to be understood, even in part, is to be violated and destroyed.”

‘Medicine River,’ by Thomas King

“Medicine River," which chronicles the lives of a group of contemporary First Nations in Western Canada, is set in a small town in Alberta that borders a Blackfoot reserve. “This most satisfying novel ends as it should, not in a clash of cymbals, but with the brushes laid quietly against the drums for a beat or so after the music ends.”

‘Rocket Boys,’ by Homer H. Hickam Jr.

Although NASA engineer Hickam’s “Rocket Boys” is mostly a memoir about his childhood in West Virginia, the book does a terrific job of telling the story of a group of men who dreamed of launching rockets into outer space. As such it’s a great book to read when you are in or traveling to the Rocket City.

‘Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World,’ by Nell Stevens

Stevens accepts a travel fellowship to the Falkland Islands, where she writes her memoir, tracing “the fits and starts of the writing process and shares some hard-won insight,” including this: “‘Surrounded by people, it is easy to feel alone,’ she writes. ‘Surrounded by penguins, less so.’”

‘Black and Blue,’ by Ian Rankin

Set in Aberdeen, “Black and Blue” is the eighth book in Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series. The novel “was a turning point in his career, selling four times as many copies as the previous Rebuses.” Rankin is “one of Scotland's most popular authors, along with Irvine Walsh, Iain Banks and, of course, J.K. Rowling.”

No. 25 Golfo Paradiso, Italy

‘The Enchanted April,’ by Elizabeth von Arnim

This 1922 novel is the story of four women from England, who are all strangers to one another. They come together for a monthlong vacation in April at a villa on Italy’s Mediterranean coast near Portofino.

No. 26 Dessau, Germany

‘The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism,’ by Nicholas Fox Weber

Although the Bauhaus, a German school of art, “lasted only from 1919 to 1933, and was forced to move from historic Weimar to industrial Dessau and then Berlin, always facing opposition, it produced worldwide changes in the arts and crafts it addressed.” The section on Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, is especially colorful.

‘The Tremor of Forgery,’ by Patricia Highsmith

This Highsmith novel, which some would say is her best, is about an American writer who becomes an “unwitting accomplice to a murder in Tunisia. The author’s ‘dry simplicity,’ said one reviewer in 1969, ‘conceals a labyrinthine complexity it is a challenge and a pleasure to untangle.’”

No. 28 Gambia

‘Reading the Ceiling,’ by Dayo Forster

This coming-of-age debut novel is the coming-of-age story of an 18-year-old Gambian woman debating her choice of suitors and what path her life will take depending on who she chooses.

No. 29 Northern Rivers, New South Wales, Australia

‘The Secret River,’ by Kate Grenville

“This unflinching novel — loosely based on Grenville’s family history — explores modern Australia’s origins through the tale of William Thornhill, a Thames boatman and petty thief who is banished with his wife to New South Wales in 1806.”

No. 30 Frisian Islands (Netherlands, Germany, Denmark)

‘The Riddle of the Sands,’ by Erskine Childers

Childers’s “The Riddle of the Sands,” which was published in 1903, deals with the discovery of a planned secret German naval invasion of Britain. It is a classic early example of the espionage novel, and it takes place in the North Frisian Islands.

No. 31 New York City

‘Invisible Man,’ by Ralph Ellison

“The Invisible Man” was published in 1952. The narrator is an unnamed African-American living in New York City in the 1930s. In the novel, Ellison grapples with man’s search for identity and place in society. A review in The Times called Ellison “an author who uses words with great skill, who writes with poetic intensity and immense narrative drive.”

‘China in Ten Words,’ by Yu Hua

“China in Ten Words” is a collection of essays in which Yu Hua “depicts a morally compromised nation, plagued by escalating unemployment, class polarization and endemic corruption and waste. At the extremes, peasants traverse the land selling their blood to the highest bidder while multimillionaires build mansions that are replicas of the White House.”

‘Snow Falling on Cedars,’ by David Guterson

Guterson's “finely wrought and flawlessly written first novel" looks at World War II’s “terrible toll on the human spirit” and the racial intolerance of Japanese-Americans that was “present even before the war.” The novel revolves around a murder trial on a fictional island in Puget Sound in 1954.

‘Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror,’ by Craig Murray

“Murder in Samarkand” is Murray’s personal account as the British envoy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, from 2002 to 2004. “In his memoir, he incorporates political argument as well as personal reflection” in a place where he “found himself caught between geopolitical considerations — the strategic partnership between Uzbekistan and the United States and Britain — and his concern for the people living under a despotic leader.”

‘The Sunlit Night,’ by Rebecca Dinerstein

This debut novel is set in Norway’s Lofoten Islands. “The constant sunlight of midsummer feeds the book’s dreamy, surreal quality.” Dinerstein’s “narrative style is also dreamlike; many things happen, but little feels at stake.”

‘A Year in Provence,’ by Peter Mayle

This “story of innocents abroad is a familiar one, but the tale bears repeating when the teller is as engaging, funny and richly appreciative of ‘serious stomachs’ as Mr. Mayle is.” Yes, it’s Provence not Lyon, but this book is perfect vacation reading, especially when you are exploring the French countryside.

‘The Girl Who Fell to Earth,’ by Sophia Al-Maria

The author’s American mother is from Washington State and her father is a Bedouin Qatari. What’s so striking about this memoir is the many forms of conflict that Al-Maria writes about. It’s not just the “tension between modernity and tradition in the Gulf States,” it’s also “her childhood shuttling between the ‘soggy blades of grass’ of the Pacific Northwest and ‘the pockmarked moonscape of construction pits and cranes’ in the Qatari capital of Doha.”

‘Stories I Stole,’ by Wendell Steavenson

Steavenson, a journalist, moves to post-Soviet Georgia and writes about her journey in a fun and caring manner. Whether it’s love, drinking, water shortages, refugees or fixed elections, it’s all there, beautifully and bizarrely told.

No. 39 Marseille, France

‘Total Chaos,’ by Jean-Claude Izzo

If you’re in Marseilles, the perfect books to read are Izzo’s noir crime novels, which are all set in that French city. And in “Total Chaos,” this seaport town’s “geography seems to dictate the narrative.”

‘Close Range: Wyoming Stories,’ by Annie Proulx

In this collection, Proulx tells the stories of people who “lead hard lives, working livestock, raising sheep, riding the rodeo circuit, selling trinkets to tourists, trying to wrest a living from the gritty hardpan of their failing farms. No one is successful here except the bar owners, the dude ranchers and the cattle traders, and they are always just offstage, counting their money.”

“Cloudstreet,’ by Tim Winton

In “Cloudstreet” — which is set in postwar, working-class Perth — Winton “captures social and commercial aspects of Western Australia's recent past: shrimping, phosphate mining, kangaroo hunting in the wheat fields.”

‘Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood’ by Marjane Satrapi

“The Story of a Childhood” is the first volume of Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” which combines political history and graphic memoir, portraying Iran’s “20th-century upheavals through the story of one family.” The protagonist, Marji, is growing up “in a fashionably radical household in Tehran,” and she is “bent on prying from her evasive elders if not truth, at least a credible explanation of the travails they are living through.

‘Terms of Endearment,’ by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry is considered by many readers to be “the most important Texas writer.” His “Terms of Endearment,” which features an overbearing widowed mother and her rebellious daughter as they face a variety of challenges, is set in Houston and considered the third volume in his Houston trilogy.

No. 47 Columbus, Ohio

‘They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,’ by Hanif Abdurraqib

Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. This book is a collection of his essays, which weave his autobiography into his thoughts on race, religion, identity and music.

No. 48 Plodiv, Bulgaria

‘The Historian,’ by Elizabeth Kostova

Kostova’s “The Historian” is a “canny high-low pop-cultural blend” with its “legend of Dracula as a central theme (think Anne Rice fans) while also being “an inquiry into the vagaries of historical research (think Umberto Eco fans).”

‘Hotel du Lac,’ by Anita Brookner

“Hotel du Lac,” which chronicles a single woman's vacation at a Swiss resort, is generally viewed as Brookner’s “most absorbing novel; the heroine is more philosophical from the outset, more self-reliant, more conscious that a solitary life is not, after all, an unmitigated tragedy.”

‘The Siege,’ by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Perez-Reverte’s genre-bending literary novel is filled with history, adventure, suspense and romance and set in Cádiz in 1811 when the Spanish port city was surrounded by Napoleon’s army.

No. 51 The Elqui Valley, Chile

‘The Savage Detectives,’ by Roberto Bolaño

“The Savage Detectives” by Bolaño, a Chilean author, tells the story of the search for a 1920s Mexican poet, Cesárea Tinajero, by two 1970s poets, the Chilean Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima of Mexico. The novel is “both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.”

‘The Moon and Sixpence,’ W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence” is a first-person narrative based on the life of Paul Gauguin. In the 1919 novel, an English banker, mirroring Gauguin, abandons his family and moves to Paris to become an artist and eventually immigrates to Tahiti. It’s a fun book to read when you are looking to get away from it all.